It's been a peculiar week. Getting back into the day job pattern after having a few short weeks (where I worked, like, two days out of seven) has been a trifle rough. Balance eludes me, though only creatively; I've been good about spending time with wife and baby, cooking, reading, and exercising daily, but not so good at writing. In fact, I haven't written a bit of fiction since I finished that novelette last week, so my only wordage this week was non-fiction. I hope to change that this weekend. I got an idea for a story that could be very long but that will, I think, work better if it's chopped up and squeezed and done as a sort of epic-in-fragments. So I'll make a run at that this weekend. Gotta keep challenging myself, right? Telling it in a straightforward linear fashion is the obvious easy thing, and we can't have that.

The weekend is supposed to be pretty, weather-wise. If so, there will be a trip to the Farmer's market, and playing in the park with the baby, and other divers excursions.

Late last night I got drunk and decided to make some sweet crepes with butter-sugar-pecan-cinnamon filling. After making the filling and starting the batter I realized I had no eggs (I didn't check first, being drunk), but I successfully substituted applesauce. Not as light and fluffy as they could have been, but very tasty all the same.

Reading: The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross, which is great fun and has a cool original approach to the idea of Story forcing the actions of characters -- something I've played with a lot in my own books, especially with the "narrative imperative" stuff in Rangergirl; so I'm loving that element. Also: hot girls, tentacled monsters, and other good stuff. Stross has always had knockout ideas, and in some of the recent books his plotting has started to be the equal of those ideas. (Prose-wise I do wish he'd stop falling back on the same descriptors over and over for his characters -- we get it, Angleton looks mummified -- but as quibbles go that's pretty minor.) Can't wait for his sequel to Halting State, which was one of my favorite novels of the past few years. Stross is one of the people who brought me back to reading science fiction after a few years of focusing on fantasy and crime novels instead.